EVENTS

Birther PAC

Unlimited money to promote unlimited stupidity.

The Minuteman organization, a loose collection of civilians who both advocate for greater border security and watch the boarder themselves, has formed a Political Action Committee. In addition to promoting immigration reform and socially conservative policies, the PAC has added another large plank to their organization; they are birthers.

Their argument, according to WND, is that because President Obama’s father was not American in accordance with the 1875 SCOTUS Minor v. Happersett he can’t be president, which is a chic way to avoid the issue of Obama’s Hawaiian birth indeed.

There exists a conspiracy theory that references the Minor v. Happersett have been scrubbed by illegally altering SCOTUS records and that theory has gained some steam in conservative circles ever since the tactic of arguing Obama’s alleged foreign birth was not well received in courts. The basic argument is that Obama is a naturalized citizen rather than natural born and thus is ineligible for the office. However, not one of the birthers attached to the Minor v. Happersett theory has ever brought up United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), in which the court ruled that persons born in the U.S. no matter their parentage are Natural Born and could assume the role of the Presidency. There was only one Judge who offered a dissenting opinion, which was based on the idea of foreigners who are citizens of an allied nation and have children inside the U.S. cannot become U.S. citizens if the allied nation has a policy preventing that action. It was the consensus of the majority that the dissenting opinion violated the constitution’s 14th amendment and thus was invalid.

No doubt birthers continue the trend of selective history and cherry picked their cases to validate their pre conceived conspiracy theory. Yet, this appeal to the birther movement should pull a tidy sum of money to the PAC, extensively to support the PAC’s stated goal of informing the citizens of America of Minor v. Happersett despite its irrelevance. At the end of the day the only real change will be that the PAC will have more money regardless and I think that might have been the real goal all along, for who could resist the collection of unlimited money from ignorant but hopeful supporters.

let’s not forget birther steve ankeny, whose march 2009 suit dropped into the birther memory hole after his appeal was denied in november 2009 by the indiana court of appeals, which concluded:

“Based upon the language of Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 and the guidance provided by Wong Kim Ark, we conclude that persons born within the borders of the United States are “natural born Citizens” for Article II, Section 1 purposes, regardless of the citizenship of their parents.”

and

“We reiterate that we do not address the question of natural born citizen status for persons who became United States citizens at birth by virtue of being born of United States citizen parents, despite the fact that they were born abroad. That question was not properly presented to this court. Without addressing the question, however, we note that nothing in our opinion today should be understood to hold that being born within the fifty United States is the only way one can receive natural born citizen status.”

kinda blows out of the water the current birther argument that obama can’t be prez cause his daddy or mommy ain’t a red-blooded american citizen, which is why they don’t talk about it much.

I think I kinda like this idea. That means that no president of this country was actually eligible for the office, meaning (according to the birthers) that any law passed under any president can now be ignored as illegitimate should we decide we don’t want to follow them.

oy, conspiracy theorists. stare too long at their arguments, and their arguments stare also into you.

citizenship law isn’t particularly obscure — as you’d expect, i guess, since it’s relatively often relied on. the Wong Kim Ark decision is over a century old; if you have to dig back further than that to find any specious grounds for your conspiracy theory, you’re better off just giving it all up.

the closest we’ve come to having a presidential candidate whose citizenship could genuinely be questioned, in living memory anyway, would’ve been McCain. and even then you would’ve had to be loony, he too was natural born thanks to his parents’ citizenship.

As I recollect, Mitten’s father, George Romney, was born in Mexico, to parents who had been living in Mexico since childhood. His grandparents fled to Mexico when the Mormons banned polygamy (grandpa just couldn’t see giving up the life). They could not, however, become Mexican citizens because Mexican law prevented it. In the early 1900’s the Romneys, with little George in tow, moved back to the US because of some unpleasantness with that Villa fellow.

I’m waiting for the birthers to howl in protest when Mitt becomes the nominee because his great-grandparents intentionally abandoned the US and only Mexican law prevented George from being a Mexican citizen.

I’m not overly fond of the President- like just about every other political critter, he’s done a few things I agree with and a lot of things I don’t.

This Birther crap is just ridiculous. IMO, the natural born citizen requirement is ridiculous as well- if we are to proclaim ourselves a nation of equals under law, then that equality cannot come with conditions. A citizenship requirement makes perfect sense, and so does a duration of residency requirement- those ensure that candidates understand the place they are running for office in, be it city, state, or nation. Where a person was born, however, has no bearing on a person’s ability to carry out the duties of their office. I would be not at all opposed to an amendment lifting the birth restriction.

We pride ourselves on being a nation of immigrants… and I would proudly vote for an immigrant President if the law permitted it, so long as they were qualified to perform the duties of the office.

Are these pac thingies actually required to talk about the candidates? If not, couldn’t sane people form their own & run an ad that essentially says “Yes, a black man was elected president now shut the fuck up and deal with it you petty minded bigoted fucks”?

Sounds like these guys, hard to get women to debase themselves to deeply, are practicing a thoroughly perverse combination of gang rape, bestiality and necrophilia. The horse they hump away on is dead, has been for years, and yet they line up to take a turn at what has become a sacrament and proof of ideological purity for the far right wing. All the time claiming they are “patriots” doing us a grand public service.

It is an embarrassment to law, the legal profession, and intelligent life everywhere.

what happened there was Jennifer Granholm served two quite successful terms as governor of Michigan. remove the natural-born requirement and she could be a real contender for first female president of the union.

When Orly Taitz was driving this particular clown car, there was a lot of talk online about the Ark decision by her supportive and quite delusional commenters. It boiled down to the idea that the founders were unspecific on what natural born meant so maybe we can use it to oust that black usurper. What all the kenyan, muslim, amurika hating, communist, fascist trash talk boiled down to was, “I am a bigot”, or “I hate liberals”, or both.

Birtherism was, at first, a seemingly (to fools) viable way to have the president removed from power, arrested and, taken to extremes, hanged. The next step was a little fuzzy. By law, Biden would be sworn in when many hoped McCain/Palin to be declared winners of the election somehow. Lots of calls for treason, etc. Little has changed in 3 years.

Congress had the opportunity to question Obama’s eligibility and they did not. Bigots go home.

Like Creationism and Human Induced Rapid Global Overheating Denialism, Birtherism has long ago and repeatedly been shown to be not merely fals ebut ridiculous but still seems to handg aoound some scenes liek a really bad stench.

You’d think the birthers would have a bigger issue to worry about: apparently the Secret Service can vet someone for security clearance as a US Senator and then as POTUS without noticing whether they’re a citizen.